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Re: SharePoint and screen readers

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From: Steve Green
Date: Mar 14, 2013 12:34PM

We have just done some JAWS testing of SharePoint 2007 and 2010 applications for a client. However, our report was limited to telling them what the front-end code needed to look like. We were not required to tell them what they needed to do in the admin website to make it happen - in fact we did not even have access to the admin website.

I have to say that the front-end code was disgusting, and I believe that the offending features were all 'out of the box' rather than something our client had done. The biggest problem was the data tables, which had context-sensitive menus that appeared when you hover a mouse over any cell or row or column header. JAWS could not see the menu, but the links (which were transparent images) caused so much 'noise' that you could not begin to understand the table contents. Every cell contained something like "onmouseover, press shift plus enter to open in a new window left paren opens in a new window right paren" in addition to the cell contents.

These hover menus also contained checkboxes that JAWS could see even if they were not visible on screen. They did not have text labels or 'id' or 'name' attributes, and there was some weird JavaScript going on that caused JAWS to think they were textboxes, and they somehow prevented JAWS from reading the right-hand column of data.

Our advice was to remove all this garbage, which the administrator thought would be fairly straightforward. Unfortunately I don't know how he planned to do it.

Steve Green